Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Completes First Launch of 2018: Secretive 'Zuma' Spacecraft (cnn.com)
SpaceX's first launch of 2018 was "a secretive spacecraft commissioned by the U.S. government for an undisclosed mission," reports TechCrunch. An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
After more than a month of delays, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket vaulted toward the skies at 8 p.m. ET Sunday with the secretive payload. It launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida... The company [then] executed its signature move: guiding the first-stage rocket booster back to Earth for a safe landing. Just over two minutes after liftoff Sunday, the first-stage booster separated from the second stage and fired up its engines. The blaze allowed the rocket to safely cut back through the Earth's atmosphere and land on a pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station... The company completed a record-setting 18 launches last year, and SpaceX plans to do even more this year, according to spokesman James Gleeson.
At this point, today's launch was by-the-numbers and something we've become used to even if SpaceX is the only company demonstrably capable of landing a 1st stage from the edge of space, even if it's only been 2 years since their 1st successful landing.
The long awaited Falcon Heavy is their next big challenge and another major milestone if they succeed.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That's not actually how things are going at all. The U.S. has always had contractors build its rockets, now some contractors have chosen to build their own and sell rides to NASA and others. This is an inevitable consequence of the development of rocketry.
If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program.
Bruce Perens.
NASA's still doing plenty of work on space exploration - they're just not investing as heavily into the rockets to get into orbit. And that's fine, it is after all now mature enough technology and market that private companies are willing to do the R&D themselves. A big win for NASA, who's now getting their launches cheaper than ever before, and without the headache of managing the details.
Meanwhile, NASA is still investing in next-generation propulsion systems - the stuff that will really let us expand into the solar system and study the universe. Solar sails, high-power ion drives, space telescopes. Stuff where there's no short-term profit to be made. Chemical rockets are great for getting from a planet's surface into orbit - a brief trip where raw power is needed in spades to offset the massive amounts of power being wasted just keeping it from falling out of the sky. Once in orbit though, they're a third-rate technology whose biggest saving grace is that they're mature and readily available.
If we want to conquer the solar system, we need engines designed for space. Not to mention low-mass radiation shielding, sustainable ecosystems, etc. Let NASA focus on developing that, and leave surface-to-orbit cargo runs to the companies who can focus on shaving down the costs without lots of bureaucratic overhead bogging them down.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sorry, I have to challenge you on a number of things about your post and the assertions within it - maybe you can provide some links to the analysis that you read to help provide some facts.
I don't think it's fair comparing Skylab to the ISS as you're comparing a short term outpost to a long term station. Skylab was occupied for a total 171 days with 3 astronauts - 513 days in operation at a cost (in today's dollars) of approximately $10B ($2.2B in 1975). That works out to $19.5M/astronaut-day in today's dollars. The ISS has a cost (so far) of $150B but has been in operation for over 17 years - let's say during that time there were only three astronauts on board, it works out to $8M/astronaut-day or about 40% of Skylab's per operating day cost. The longer the ISS stays up in it's present configuration (and you expand the calculation to include the number of days its had more than three astronauts), that number will be significantly less and continue to fall.
Sorry, NASA budgets have never approached DOD budgets - Take a look at the US budget for 1967 in which the major investments in Apollo was taking place:
(http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/69/1967): "General Space, Science and Technology" (which I'm guessing is more than just NASA) is 7% of the budget while the DOD was 49%.
It's hard finding costs for Saturn boosters sans payloads, but I think you would find that their costs are very competitive compared to existing expendable launchers (as well as the space shuttle) and in the ballpark of the Falcon 9. What makes difficult to get apples-to-apples costs is that the Saturn V was not designed to deliver payloads into LEO - the third stage was used to achieve orbit as well as restarted to send the CM/SM/LM to the moon. Probably the best way to calculate costs per pound are to use the Saturn V first and second stage to put up Skylab as well as the Saturn IVB used to send the CM/SM to to Skylab.
The Skylab Saturn V first and second stage costs were $50M (in 1975 dollars) with a Skylab payload of 170,000 lb. which works out to $294/lb to LEO. The Saturn IVB which sent the CM/SM and consumables to Skylab cost $25M (in 1975 dollars) with a payload of 46,000 lb. which works out to $543/lb to LEO. I have a Time book on Apollo, from when I was a kid, in which the cost per pound for the Saturn V launch was stated to be $500/lb. - so these numbers seem reasonable. In today's dollars (using http://www.usinflationcalculat...), that's $1,347/lb for the Skylab Saturn V and $2,487/lb for the Saturn IVB. As a point of comparison, the Falcon 9 costs $1,240/lb. The Ariane 5, in its smallest/cheapest configuration is $4,700/lb.
The STS was a bad left turn for launchers and set the expectation that launch costs would be in the range of $10,000/lb or more. I think that was the real crime - the shuttle's costs got out of control very quickly and nothing was done to reign them in. If the decision was made to drop the STS and keep with Apollo technology (just like the Russians that continued working with their 1960s/1970s technology), which was proven, reliable and cheap compared to the resulting STS and expendable boosters costs, along with the same NASA budgets for space exploration, then I suspect a station of the ISS' capabilities could have been put up by the late 1970s as well as maybe an outpost on the moon by 2001 - and we would have avoided the long drought in government sponsored manned space exploration.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Rumors going around that the payload failed after releasing from the second stage. Any truth to those rumors?